"This is the coolest Baccalaureate ceremony I've ever seen," declared Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host and editor of Newsweek International,
from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church in America. Undoubtedly,
the founders would have been dumbfounded by the service's multilingual
program of music, prayers, dances, and poems representing a dozen
faiths and cultures; but its energy and breadth clearly delighted the
speaker, who was born in Mumbai, India, and is known for the scope and
depth of his international understanding.

Mary Beth Meehan

Zakaria and Simmons march to the Baccalaureate cermony.

Although the U.S. military is fighting in two countries and the global
economy is in a deep recession, Zakaria took a long, even optimistic,
view of the world the graduates were entering. "You are at the hinge of
history," he said, emphasizing how rare it is that the globe is not
dominated by a serious conflict between superpowers. "You may think of
this as an abstract idea, but peace is after all the bedrock of
civilization.... Peace is a little bit like oxygen. When you have it
you don't think a lot about it. But when you don't have it it's all you
think about."

Yes, terrorism is a threat, he said, but it does not exact the toll
war does. Furthermore, terrorism "depends on you. If you are not
terrorized, it doesn't work," he said. "Get out from under the beds.
Resilience is the path to defeating this great scourge of our time."

This is not the world's first financial crash, Zakaria continued. He
urged students to look past the current crisis to the past decade's
economic growth. Over the last eight years, he said, 100 countries have
grown at a rate of 4 percent a year or more. The diffusion of knowledge
around the globe has created political and economic stability that has
lifted millions of people out of abject poverty—400 million in the last
year alone.

When people make dire predictions, they tend to forget about the human response, Zakaria said. "That's where I have my hope."

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The Brown Alumni Magazine is published bimonthly, in print since 1900.